Archive for the ‘WDW’ Category

Over the weekend, Disney increased ticket prices for both Disneyland and Walt Disney World. “It’s a tradition,” says self-appointed Disney history historian Ferdinand Bullworth. “It stems from Walt Disney’s nostalgic rememberings of his local movie theater raising their movie prices every year. The company’s decision to continue that tradition is yet another wonderful link to the yesteryear of Walt’s youth.”

Continuing tradition is only one benefit of the annual price increase. “For all of my friends in the Disney fan and blogging community, it saves us a lot of work,” says PrincesMickey1955 via misdirected text message. “Every year, we just dust off our rants and complaints about not being able to afford to visit parks and Disney no longer caring for the average visitor, update the numbers, and re-post them to Facebook, our blogs, Twitter — everywhere. It’s like a little vacation so we can do some extra shopping for Valentines Day. Thanks Disney!”

In the light of growing unrest among Imagineers over the prospect of having to construct a Donald Trump animatronic for the Hall of Presidents, an unpresidented (pun intended) decision has been made. According to a woman high up in Imagineering who appeared to us in a dream and will be referred to as Bob, “Due to various Imagineers’ discomfort with creating an animatronic figure of our new President, the Walt Disney Company has decided to completely revamp Walt Disney World’s Hall of Presidents. The Hall of Presidents will have its final operating day on January 20, 2017, and will reopen on January 21, 2017, as an entirely new attraction, the Hall of Former Presidents.”

This is seen as a win for both staff and management, as the change will require only new signage. “This is not necessarily a permanent retheming,” added Bob. “The issue of the attraction’s ongoing identity will be revisited after the inevitable impeachment.”

It’s official: Disney World Imagineers must steel themselves for the emotionally difficult task of creating an animatronic Donald Trump and installing it in the Hall of Presidents.

“We have asked if we can put the Trump animatronic in the back, maybe facing a wall,” said one Imagineer on condition of our making clear that this is a fake news site and everyone at Disney is actually really, really excited about the new administration. “If that doesn’t work out, we’d like to make his Presidential speech 140 characters or less. You know, to match his style.”

In related news, it appears that Disney will face a 35% penalty tax if all of Epcot’s international employees aren’t replaced with (quoting dubious government sources) “Real Americans.” Construction on the wall around the Mexico pavilion starts Monday.

According to second-hand information that we happened across on some random web site, Disney will officially be removing the gigantic Sorcerer Mickey Hat from Disney’s Hollywood Studios. Presumably, they will also be removing the gigantic Sorcerer Mickey figure that has been buried beneath the hat for more than a decade with only one hand showing (the other hand is not part of the buried figure; it previously adorned Epcot’s Spaceship Earth and is being warehoused off site in anticipation of a reunion with the bulk of Giant Sorcerer Mickey’s body).

It has not been decided what will be built in the hat’s place to disrupt the gorgeous view of the Great Movie Ride. “We were thinking maybe just a big billboard at first,” said a person we talked to who sounded like he knew what he was talking about. “After that, maybe a gigantic Darth Vader head. It hasn’t been decided.”

Too many Disney news stories today to keep track of! Some highlights for those of you who don’t have time for actual news sources:

There’s a new Frozen short film coming! In “Frozen Fever,” Anna catches a cold from building a snowman with her sister and, in a state of fevered delirium, leaves Kristoff for Olaf.

A few days ago, Disney fan Brent Dodge set a record by visiting every attraction at every park in Walt Disney World every day for 365 days. Said Dodge, “I’m tired.” Several groups are protesting his record, contending that he cheated by not seeing all shows and parades and deliberately not counting attractions that were closed for refurbishment.

Disney has officially announced a trademark lawsuit against mouse-themed music creator Deadmau5 over his use of a logo that looks suspiciously like the famous Disney Mickey Mouse silhouette a fraction of a second after a stick of dynamite exploded in Mickey’s mouth. Deadmau5 responded to Disney’s lengthy legal complaint by cutting it into bits and mixing it with a complaint of his own creation so that it was easier to dance to.

Over the last weekend, the total global box office receipts for Frozen passed $800 million, which means that if the movie were a nation its annual GDP would exceed that of 91% of the world’s countries, putting it in 17th place, right above Turkey (and with its eye on Indonesia).

All of this attention has rumors swirling about the possibility of a Frozen attraction appearing at one or more of Disney’s theme parks. According to a portion of commenters on the Official Unofficial LEGOLand Fanblog Discussion Forum’s “Other” subsection, Disney may be planning a reskinning of the Epcot’s Norway Pavilion’s Maelstrom attraction. The overlay would be fairly simple — little more than redecorating a few trolls as princesses and snowmen and installing equipment to freeze all the water — but might cause more problems than it solves. “The little movie shown after the attraction would just be that much more confusingly contextless,” said a person clutching a tiny Norway flag on a stick and looking at it wistfully. “There are already too many people who either walk on out without seeing it or emerge from the theater with a glazed look in their eyes. Also, the country of Norway sponsors the pavilion and we don’t want to upset them — particularly when their military power is almost equal to that of Disney.”

A far more appetizing option (with not apologies for the pun) would be to convert the Akershus (gesundheit) princess breakfast into an exclusively Frozen themed one. This would be another easy change, necessitating only turning down the thermostat a tad more, swapping in two new princesses, and replacing the current smorgasbord with a selection of frozen foods. “I would welcome the change,” said Arial, one of the princesses often found in the current breakfast. “I wouldn’t mind being transferred to another part of one of the parks — preferably one without such an emphasis on eating fish.”

At DisneyLies.com, we frequently receive e-mails from people with Disney-related websites who want us to promote their online presence to our copious bounty of readers. So it was with great surprise that we received an e-mail from Mike “Wazowski” Roberts, which read something like nothing like this:

Dear people at DisneyLies.com. You are brilliant and intelligent and I have committed myself to naming all my future offspring after you, but today I am contacting you about another issue entirely.

I have a new website called www.wdwvacationhub.com that, despite the name, is intended to act somewhat as a hub of information on Walt Disney World vacations. I am hoping that you could assist me by asking your readers to completely ignore my page as if it didn’t even exist. You see, it is so incredibly full of useful information that I am currently swamped by traffic. Lesson learned: I should have set up some kind of server to handle page requests instead of typing them in by hand, on demand, in real time.

Please do not link to my page. That would kind of defeat the purpose. Also, please let me know where to send you a pile of money.

We did not take any money from Mike (if that’s his real name), largely because he didn’t actually offer us any. Even so, we are more than happy to pass along the above message as if he wrote it himself.

If you have a Disney-related website that you would like us to mention on this blog, please feel free to write to us about it. We can’t say what will happen after that, but we would love to hear from you.

Update: We had to edit the page to repair the horribly incorrect URL that used to be here and to correctly spell “promote” which had been autocorrected to “kiss up to like Eisner’s closest coworker.”

Disneyland and Walt Disney World planned to surprise park guests with a special promotion tied in to today’s release of Prince of Persia, Disney’s third video-game-inspired film (after Tron and Grand Theft Auto: Toontown). The promotion involved special “Sands of Time” tickets randomly distributed to guests who received FASTPASSes. According to the text on the tickets, a guest leaving an indicated attraction could give the ticket to any cast member and “be taken back in time to the point where you entered the vehicle loading area, exactly as if you had returned to the moment before you rode!” This effectively allowed a lucky guest to ride an attraction twice in a row while only standing in line once.

It sounded like a neat idea, something that would generate excellent online buzz, but there was a problem. Guests quickly began to balk when cast members attempted to take their Sands of Time ticket from them. As one guest put it, “If I’m traveling back in time, then I’m traveling back to a time when I had the ticket, not to a time when I didn’t have the ticket yet, so why should I have to give it up? And since I still have it when I get off the ride, why can’t I use it to travel back in time and ride again, like I’m in an infinite time loop? Then when I’m tired, I can just get off the ride and choose not to use the ticket, and I shouldn’t have to give it away when I didn’t use it, so there’s no situation in which I should have to let a cast member take my ticket.”

When guests who had won tickets began using this logical loophole to bring the queue at Expedition Everest (and, soon, other attractions) to a crawl, Disney realized they had to do something. The first thing they did was stop FASTPASS machines from giving out more tickets. The second thing they did was quickly inform cast members not to mention to guests that if the park is closing they could use their ticket to “go back in time” to just before the park closed and take another ride, then do it again, and again, and again, possibly keeping attractions open long into the night.

And the trouble doesn’t stop there. “We forgot to put expiration dates on the things,” said a suicidal-looking member of the team that brainstormed the Sands of Time promotion. “At this point, there’s nothing that can be done. We may have ruined Disney parks permanently.”

Another quick note on dining from Walt Disney World — the new Queen Victoria’s Room at Victoria & Albert’s restaurant in the Grand Floridian hotel has been running for a week now and reviews are almost universally positive. Said one guest, “Why go to some crummy character meal where you might have nothing more than a quick photo op with some made-up princess when you can have Queen Victoria herself as your table server! The food was great, the service was — of course! — impeccable, and the price only differed from that of a more common character meal by a few orders of magnitude.”

Last Sunday, there was a big change made to Cinderella’s Royal Table at Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom. Originally, Cinderella was the only princess who put in an appearance during dinner, but beginning on the 7th guests were greeted by a whole bevy of Disney’s princesses. Why the change? “It’s the economy,” said Cindy, a Royal Table cast member and future queen of the realm. “It was just too expensive for all the princesses to maintain their own castles, so we decided to pool our resources and be roomies! And we’re having so much fun!”

Guests interested in meeting the princesses should take note that both the Royal Table dinner service and the new Midnight Princess Pillow-Fight Delight show sell out months in advance. Make your reservations now!